The mechanics of Shadowrun: Corrosion are broken and I don’t know how to fix it and I’m starting to suspect it can’t actually be fixed. Or rather, it can’t be fixed in a way that would still remain somewhat true to the old SR3 system. It rarely happens that in the table-top version of Shadowrun, you end up playing a 1000+ karma character. But it happens rather “quickly” in Corrosion. Currently, you are able to make about 30 karma a day if you really dedicate yourself to it. (I’m not entirely sure how feasible it is, but theoretically, you could do two missions and about 20+ duels, and then I’m not counting what you can make in the arena.)
Once you’ve got your attributes maxed out, which is relatively soon, and you’ve lowered the costs of improving your skills, you could quite quickly and quite easily jack your pistols/smg/unarmed/edged weapons up to around 20 skill points, at which point it becomes a game I’d like to call “D or be D’ed” — essentially, you do deadly damage or you get deadly damage, depending on whether you win the initiative roll or not.
This makes for a fairly boring game. Very few duels or PvP fights last more than one or two rounds. And the game starts to revolve around who can chuck the most drugs and still be effective in combat. I think it’s inherent to the game of Shadowrun. The lethality makes the table top game so great and suspenseful, but if you’re doing it as a browser game, it becomes very boring in my opinion. I’m wondering how Shadowrun Returns is going to deal with that.
A game that revolves around hitpoints, generally, makes it a little more easy. You can scale hit points together with damage resisting qualities, damage dealing qualities and you can even play with critical hit possibilities. Gear will simply scale with your progression through the game. I’ve heard people say that you’ll start out with a weapon that does 4 damage while your enemies have 10 hitpoints and after a year you have a weapon that does 400 damage, while your enemies have 1000 hitpoints. In the end, it all remains the same. I suppose that in a sense that’s true, but when the hitpoints always remain the same; namely the 10 boxes on your stun and physical monitor, things become dull.
It’s really bugging me. To the point where I don’t see any reason to continue expanding upon anything else in the game until I’ve figured it out. If I don’t figure it out, and I continue adding new content or fixing bugs, I just have the feeling I’m decorating a cabin on the Titanic; a little pointless in the end.
In the mean time, I’ve had some ideas for other games that might work much better and I’m wondering if it’s not better to cut the game loose and move on.
